STEAM Mondays!

For the month of January I facilitated the Science Technology Engineering Art and Math (STEAM) Mondays for the Cascade After-school Program.

The theme that was chosen for the month of January was Snow I facilitated an afterschool program three consecutive Mondays that revolved around snow science, and the science of water…which is snow.

This group of students is my widest age range from Kindergarten to 4th grade.

This is challenging for two reasons, my experience with younger students is very limited and designing lessons that will engage such a wide range of grade levels has not been easy. I try to give my older students more responsibilities in this type of class setting. I try to give them ownership of their learning.

The first time I met with this group of students we discussed how snow crystals form, how each snow crystal is unique, and how each snow flake has 6 sides.

I introduced snowflakes by projecting images on the board of snowflakes under high powered microscopes. The students marveled at the images and I gave them each a chance to come to the room and tell the other students what they noticed about the images.

After discussing snow flake form it was time to get hands on! Each student was given a hand lenses and we went outside to make our own scientific observations or the snow in our own back yard. Immediately they noticed that the snow from the piles outside our classroom looked nothing like the snowflakes we looked at on the computer. I held a discussion about why that might be. I then asked the question if the snow crystals looked different in different parts of the snow pile which sent them digging.

Upon returning to the classroom we watched a short video on snowflake formation and then created our own 6-sided paper snowflakes!